kescusay
@kescusay@lemmy.world
Developer and refugee from Reddit
- Comment on Jack Dorsey's New Company Falling Apart as It Forces Employees to Use AI 1 day ago:
Oh, the guy from Hermit Tech! He’s great, and his blog is hilarious and poignant in turns (though sometimes both at the same time).
- Comment on Jack Dorsey's New Company Falling Apart as It Forces Employees to Use AI 2 days ago:
You wanna know who really bags on LLMs? Actual AI developers. I work with some, and you’ve never heard someone shit all over this garbage like someone who works with neural networks for a living.
- Comment on Talents leave AI companies: "They are putting profits over sanity and safety" 2 days ago:
They’re also not providing a large language model, so they actually did have a path to profitability. It’s keeping LLMs updated and running that costs so much money that companies trying to do so are losing billions, and Midjourney doesn’t have that problem.
It’s just that their path to profitability was built on plagiarism on an astonishing scale. You’re spot on, they should have been utterly destroyed right at the start.
- Comment on Talents leave AI companies: "They are putting profits over sanity and safety" 3 days ago:
And it’s not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they’re putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.
- Comment on Rufus blames Microsoft for allegedly blocking latest Windows 11 ISO downloads 5 days ago:
I have a work-supplied laptop with Windows on it. I use it maybe once or twice a month, just for the things requiring a VPN. The rest of the time it sits there gathering dust while I get real work done on my Linux laptop.
The specs on the work laptop say it should be a performance beast, but my Linux machine (with half the RAM) runs circles around it.
- Comment on Lawyers increasingly have to convince clients that AI chatbots give bad advice 5 days ago:
I’m watching that happen in my industry (software development). There’s this massive pressure campaign by damn near everyone’s employers in software dev to use LLM tools.
It’s causing developers to churn out terrible, fragile, unmaintainable code at a breakneck pace, while they’re actively forgetting how to code for themselves.
- Comment on Western Digital runs out of HDD capacity: CEO says massive AI deals secured, price surges ahead 1 week ago:
A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It’s got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.
Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I’ll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.
What mystifies me about all this is that it’s obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.
When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can’t get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don’t want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.
Shit’s gonna get stupid, fast.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 1 week ago:
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re working on it. He’s destroying their bottom lines.
That said, if you go after the king, you’d best not miss.
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 1 week ago:
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
- Comment on The AI boom is so huge it’s causing shortages everywhere else The $700 billion AI spending spree has few precedents. Good luck finding an electrician or a reasonably priced smartphone. 2 weeks ago:
The AI boom
They misspelled “bubble.” None of the AI providers have a path towards profitability.
- Comment on Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments 2 weeks ago:
Yes, it’s base64. And what’s behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.
In this case, it’s a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.
The challenge is basically twofold:
- There’s a lot of text, and it needs to be extracted perfectly. Even one character being wrong corrupts it and makes it impossible to decode.
- As the article points out, there are lots of visual problems with the encoded text, including the shitty font it’s displayed with, which makes automating the extraction damn near impossible. OCR is very good these days, but this is kind of a perfect example of text that it has trouble with.
As for my approach, I’m basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.
- Comment on Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments 2 weeks ago:
I’m not having trouble with it as such, it’s just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it’s ridiculously time-consuming.
- Comment on Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments 2 weeks ago:
Long story short:
- Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
- The way attachments work in emails is that they’re converted to encoded text.
- That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
- So it’s theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.
Source: I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
- Comment on 'I'll believe it when I see it': Windows 11 users are cynical about Microsoft's promises to fix the OS and stop pushing AI 2 weeks ago:
Welcome! Isn’t it a breath of fresh air to use an OS that isn’t trying to turn your computer into an advertising and upselling platform? It has its issues, but it’s a huge relief to escape the constant inundation from Microsoft.
(Obligatory: I use arch BTW)
- Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it 4 weeks ago:
God, that’s so frustrating. I want to shake them and shout, “No, your code is 100% ass now, but you don’t know it because it passes tests that were written by the same LLM that wrote your code! And you have barely laid eyes on it, so you’re forgetting what good code even looks like!”
- Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it 4 weeks ago:
So in your case, not only is the LLM coding assistant not making you faster, it’s actively impeding your productivity and the productivity of your stakeholders. That sucks, and I’m sorry you’re having to put up with it.
I’m lucky that in my day job, we’re not (yet) forced to use LLMs, and the “AI coding platform” our upper management is trying to bring on as an option is turning out to be an embarrassing boondoggle that can’t even pass cybersecurity review. My hope is that the VP who signed off on it ends up shit-canned because it’s such a piece of garbage.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it 4 weeks ago:
“Cognitive amplifier?” Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.
I’m watching people in my industry (software development) who’ve bought into this crap forget how to code in real-time while they’re producing the shittiest garbage I’ve laid eyes on as a developer. And students who are using it in school aren’t learning, because ChatGPT is doing all their work - badly - for them. The smart ones are avoiding it like the blight on humanity that it is.
- Comment on Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch 5 weeks ago:
Which version of Linux did you install? It supports a lot of them, and most have updaters that are easily configured from the task bar, just like Windows.
- Comment on A generation taught not to think: AI in the classroom 5 weeks ago:
Thanks to this crap, the world is being flooded with awful, unmaintainable code, and the thing is, the LLMs that build it promptly forget everything about it as soon as you move on to the next task. Fixing this garbage will be an unending nightmare.
- Comment on A generation taught not to think: AI in the classroom 1 month ago:
I interview juniors regularly. I can’t wait until the first time I interview a “vibe coder” who thinks they’re a developer, but can’t even tell me what a race condition is or the difference between synchronous and asynchronous execution.
That’s going to be a red letter day, lemme tell ya.
- Comment on Windows 11 25H2 Includes a Faster NVMe Driver Needing Manual Installation 1 month ago:
Hmmm. The NVMe standard has existed since 2011, and Samsung released their first commercially-available drive with it in 2013. So Microsoft has had at least 12 years to make nvmedisk.sys the standard driver for these disks.
- Comment on Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI 1 month ago:
You use his work and derivatives of it every day.
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 2 months ago:
He’s in Australia. It was already the 15th there when he posted that, but the person you’re responding to isn’t in Australia and the blog they copied and pasted from probably compensated for time zones.
- Comment on A Vibe Coded SaaS Killed My Team 2 months ago:
A software developer found out that the failing company they’re at, which was winding down for business reasons, decided to try becoming a zombie company by replacing its software stack (and employees) with a vibe-coded SaaS piece of garbage that’s broken in dozens of ways.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 3 months ago:
You do know you can use AD with Linux, don’t you?
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 3 months ago:
The thing is, it really won’t. The context window isn’t large enough, especially for a decently-sized application, and that seems to be a fundamental limitation. Make the context window too large, and the LLM gets massively offtrack very easily, because there’s too much in it to distract it.
And LLMs don’t remember anything. The next time you interact with it and put the whole codebase into its context window again, it won’t know what it did before, even if the last session was ten minutes ago. That’s why they so frequently create bloat.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 3 months ago:
Well, if I’m not, then neither is an LLM.
But for most projects built with modem tooling, the documentation is fine, and they mostly have simple CLIs for scaffolding a new application.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 3 months ago:
Yeah, I have never spent “days” setting anything up. Anyone who can’t do it without spending “days” struggling with it is not reading the documentation.
- Comment on The aws outage is so funny, I can see which companies are amazon scums. 3 months ago:
Sadly, there are some who don’t even know it, because they’re buying services from someone else that buys them from someone else that buys them from Amazon. So they’re currently wondering what the fuck is even going on, since they thought they weren’t using AWS.
- Comment on The AI that we'll have after AI (Doctorow) 4 months ago:
They’ll ask their parents, or look up cooking instructions on actual websites.